CARACAS – Political and social sectors in opposition to the Chavista government of President Nicolas Maduro held a massive event on Tuesday called “Venezuela Won’t Surrender,” at which they took the first step toward creating a Broad National Front, whose definitive founding is set for next Thursday.

“Those of us who are here today have decided to get over our divisions, desperation and despair with a call for national unity and by joining forces to bring down the government,” journalist Alba Cecilia Mujica read from a proclamation to the crowd after the event at the Central University of Venezuela (UCV).

The text, the result of talks among representatives of the health, petroleum, academic, student and business sectors, among others, said that it’s time to promote and solidify a unified, inclusive organization whose founding will be based on a wide consensus.”

The document called on those who share ideas of change “to act immediately to restore the full validity of the Constitution and to undertake the unavoidable task of reconstructing the country.”

It demanded the “immediate activation” of a humanitarian channel to bring into the country the food and medicine the opposition has requested for months, but which the government has rejected under the pretext that it would bring about an “undercover invasion.”

“The same with the application of an economic policy that would end hyperinflation,” calculated in 2017 by the National Assembly legislature at more than 2,600 percent.

This new movement, according to the proclamation, “would also free political prisoners and rescue those persecuted and on trial.”

It also demanded the “reestablishment of democratic institutions, the separation of powers and the full restitution of the Constitution.”

In that regard it described as a “fraud” the plenipotentiary and ruling-party-dominated National Constituent Assembly (ANC), a body that, according to the document, “is an infernal machine invented to bury popular sovereignty and free elections in order to finish off the few traces of democracy that still remain.”

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